The Svenska Journalistförbundet, Swedish affiliate of the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ), organised on Wednesday (10/06/2015) in Malmö a protest against the double use zero pay policy affecting press photographers and freelance journalists working for the newspaper Sydsvenskan.
The Swedish daily newspaper Sydsvenskan bought at the end of last year another newspaper Helsingborgs Dagblad and the management wants to re-publish all the material from freelancers (photographers and reporters) without any financial compensation for the authors.

Since November 2014, the Swedish union has initiated the negotiations with the management of Sydsvenskan without any progress achieved so far. A concrete proposal was put on the table by the Swedish union who asked for a raise of 30 % on the agreed fees in case of double use of the material for the second newspaper of the group or a general raise of 20 % for all freelance productions. The management offered nothing in response.

Well organised freelancers

The freelancers that are affected by this have been well organized. More then 90 of them wrote a letter to the direction of Sydsvenskan demanding a compensation for this trespass in their authors right.
“We have seen several examples of this the most recent year: magazines and newspapers that want to republish freelance material without paying anything extra for it. So it’s an important focus in our work to counteract this”, said a representative of the Svenska Journalistförbundet.